This is the introduction to the book, Feminist Legal History. This
edited collection offers new visions of American legal history that
reveal women’s engagement with the law over the past two centuries. It
integrates the stories of women into the dominant history of the law in
what has been called “engendering legal history,” (Batlan 2005) and then
seeks to reconstruct the assumed contours of history.

The
introduction provides the context necessary to appreciate the diverse
essays in the book. It starts with an overview of the existing state of
women’s legal history, tracing the core events over the past two hundred
years. This history, while sparse, provides the common foundation for
the authors, and establishes the launching point for the deeper and more
detailed inquiries offered here. Following this history is an
exploration of the key themes advanced in the book. In Part I,
Contradictions in Legalizing Gender, the essays develop analyses of the
law’s contradictory response to women’s petitions. The essays in this
section provide evidence of how law operated as a barrier to limit
women’s power, and challenge the assumptions that such barriers have
been eliminated today. Yet the essays in part I also present a more
nuanced historical picture. They show the law’s facilitation of women’s
agency and power, often based on the same gendered norms that elsewhere
produced limitations. Part II of the book, Women’s Transformation of the
Law, shows women’s impact upon the law and illustrates how women
changed the law to incorporate their own, gendered, perspectives. By
“feminizing” the legal process and altering the substantive law to
respond to women’s needs, women were able to shape the law in their own
image.